The SCMS, or Smogon Content Management System, is the heart of all the content on Smogon, with the exception of the forums. Created by chaos in the late months of 2007, the SCMS has been used since, and there's little to no intention of switching. Despite the tool's age, it's still able to carry a bulk of the weight, mainly because of developments that were made routinely by users such as Articuno64 and DougJustDoug, who are still around today. To get a taste of how much the system has progress throughout the years, take a look at the first news post via the SCMS.

Getting Started

Before attempting to edit or simply use the SCMS, you should become familiar with how it's structured and how it operates.

Access Levels

The distribution of power throughout the SCMS is almost identical to that of the forums; any user visiting the site, even if they're not registered or logged in on the forums, is assigned a permission group. Note that there is no nomenclature for these groups written in stone, so they may be referred to as something different around the site.

Normal Users

Who is in this group?

Banned users

Unregistered users

Logged out users

Users who are simply registered, as opposed to users who are "community members" (those who hold at least one badge)

What can users in this group do?

Users in this group cannot view or edit the SCMS whatsoever.

Privileged Users

Who is in this group?

Those who are "community members", or badgeholders, as they're commonly referred to. Note that users who simply have a trophy are not in this group, they are in the "Normal Users" group

What can users in this group do?

Users in this group can view the SCMS as well as make edits to it. However, before their edits are seen on-site, the revision must be reviewed by a user with a Site Staff badge. If a member of the site staff chooses to accept your changes, they will "cache" it, or make the change live.

Trusted Users

Who is in this group?

Users who have the Site Staff badge

What can users in this group do?

Users in this group can virtually do anything with the SCMS; they can cache edits, add new sections to the site, edit existing site sections (as well as reorder them), delete pages, and upload (and trash) images.

Super Users

Who is in this group?

This group is unique in that there is no set process on how to become a super user; individuals are chosen by already existing super users on a case-by-case basis. Currently there are only four super users: chaos, DougJustDoug, mingot, and Cathy.

What can users in this group do?

Users in this group can virtually do anything with the site, bar the forums (but in every case thus far, if a user has this access on-site, they have the same on the forums as well); some examples of things that they can do are making changes to the site source code, modifying the Pokedex on the database level (they are able to add Pokemon, moves, etc.), and making general site-wide changes.

Note: Each permission group inherits the permissions of the one below it (in terms of power, not how it is laid out here).

Looking Around

Now that you've familiarized yourself a bit with the SCMS, it's time to finally access it. The Smogon Content Management System is located here. Now that you're there, look around! It's not possible to break anything or do something destructive, so be bold when you edit as it can all be reverted, and most of the time it is caught before it is put on the production site.

Walkthrough

The following images show all the possible situations you may encounter when using the SCMS.

An area where color is used to markup the changes between the two revisions

If you'd like to revert back to a revision, select the one you want to change back to

The reason why you've reverted back

Click me!

Editing Comfortably

Metadata

In order to establish metadata for a page, you have to use specialized tags exclusive to the SCMS. For a tag to work, it must be the only thing on a line; the content after the tag's line is what will belong to that tag (note that once another tag is declared the process will repeat). The three most common ones are:

Each section (with the exception of the news section) must have a file called "_config". Configuration files only have two usable tags, both different from the ones mentioned above (only use one of these tags per each "_config"!):

[navigation]

Declares what text and what it hyperlinks to in the navigation field (the leftmost part of each page on-site separated from the content by a vertical rule or line).

The text before the vertical bar declares the text that is hyperlinked; the text after the vertical bar must be a correct path on Smogon; the text after the vertical bar is the hyperlink mentioned earlier.

King of Irrelevancy

take note that for pokemon who have a dream world analysis in addition to their normal analysis page, clicking the SCMS bookmark on their normal analysis page will take you to the SCMS page for their dream world analysis instead of the SCMS page you actually want

Moderator

take note that for pokemon who have a dream world analysis in addition to their normal analysis page, clicking the SCMS bookmark on their normal analysis page will take you to the SCMS page for their dream world analysis instead of the SCMS page you actually want

After modifying the "_config" file, the whole section must be cached in order for the changes to appear.

Click to expand...

the _config entry doesn't show its changes after being cached. All entries in that section have to be cached again for changes in _config to work. This is just something useful / interesting to note when making changes to _config because it doesn't show up until everything is cache .-. /me slap _config lol

This is unlikely to be applicable in the Dex or anything C&C related, but it's good to know I guess, especially for other sections >.>

/me runs

Edit: erm iirc the entries have to be cached manually one by one too >.>

Moderator

Is there a way to allow the bookmark to lead to the correct SCMS? Just wondering, doesn't matter if there isn't lol.

Click to expand...

Sorry to revive such an old topic, but is there really no way to get this bookmark to link to the analysis you're on? This was really confusing until I figured out what was happening. Perhaps changing the page that you get linked to when you click on an analyses outside of the scms to make it automatically the /ou tag?